Category: Asus TF700

In short – just get rid of the stock ASUS software as fast as possible. I’ve been foolish enough to put up with it for far too long. Despite of often non-warranted reboots, sluggish performance I didn’t try to get rid of it for about a year. Finally, it pushed me over the edge with 12 reboots over the last two days.

Here’s all I’ve literally done:

Get Titanium backup from the Play Store. I can’t more highly recommend Pro version as it makes backups and especially restores a breeze.

Back you applications and user data. While not required, I’ve used an external sd card for that – not the embeded device storage.

Follow up the instructions from CyanogenMod Wiki Now, I happened to have TWRP recovery image installed. So, it works just fine. However, makesure that bootloader version is 10.6.1.14.4 or higher. You might want to check my earlier post on the rooting of the ASUS 700t

I have chosen to install release version 10.2 (along with the recommended GoogleApp zip file from their download area.

Once in the recovery, I have wiped up the system, caches, data and did Factory Reset on top of it. Then the zip files downloaded earlier were installed and the device rebooted for the first time.

Now the first boot took a couple of minutes – I guess some initial steps were done at first time. So be patient. A very easy and self explanatory setup procedure starts immediately once the boot process is over. Once the system is configured you should have the access to the Internet, your email, calendar, and Market.

Now it is time to restore your stuff back to its original glory 🙂 I recommend to install TitaniumBackup from the Market first. Then run it and change preferences to point to your earlier backup location. From there I recommend to restore TitaniumBackup PRO – that will make the restoration process so much easier.

During the restore you can safely avoid any of the annoying ASUS apps and services if you don’t need them. I acctually recommend not to restore Device Unlock app – for whatever reason restore process hung on that in my case.

Everything is restored. Now one more reboot just in case and you have your system back – flying high and fast.

One thing you might want to pay some attention to is new Privacy Guard, that allows you to restrict what the apps can learn and share about you. In other words, now you have a fine control over your personal data and prevent apps from imposing totally insane and unrealistic permission settings.

What I’ve noticed immediately is that I no longer have the blank message issue in my K-9 Mail, that been haunting me for like 6 months. So, it is gone for good! Keyboard works perfectly – I am typing this blog on my Transformer. So by all means folks – get youself CyanogenMod and experiene like brand new, fast tablet!

I didn’t expect this to be so hard, really. The rooting is usually a pretty straight forward process that can be done quickly. However, considering the amount of issues around the upgrading ICS table to JB with or without rooting the first; number of the posts on xda-developers.com forum that refers to the same partially outdated recovery images, it wasn’t easy. However, here’s the easiest way to root your stock JB Transformer device:

Prerequisites: # I am doing everything on Linux # You need to either install Android SDK or get adb and fastboot tools for your distribution

1. Push CWM-SuperSU to the device % adb push SuperSU.zip /sdcard2. Download and unpack ClockWorkMod Recovery v6.0.1.4 rename recovery_jb.img to recovery.img3. Boot your device to fastboot mode % adb reboot bootloaderUse Vol- to scroll to USB icon (fastboot mode); use Vol+ to select4. Unlock the bootloaded using UnLock_Device_App_V7.apk (google to download the file). Or alternatively you should be able to do use % fastboot oem unlock(please note, that you might be better off by running fastbook as root user). ASUS VendorID is 0x0B05. To find out the id for your device use lsusb.5. Flash recovery.img to your device and reboot % fastboot -i 0x0B05 flash recovery recovery.img % fastboot -i 0x0B05 reboot6. Boot to fastboot mode again (as in #2 above) and enter Recovery mode7. Install SuperSU from the zip file on sdcard8. Reboot once again9. Install RootChecker from Google Play and make sure your devices is rooted.